Revision as of 14:12, 27 March 2014

This page tracks a proposal from the schema.org team for modeling various kinds of roles and contributions in a way that allows rich qualification. For example, when we say that a Person was an actor in a Movie, we might want to mention their characterName too. When we say that a SportsTeam has a Person as an athlete, we might want to mention the position that they play, or the time period in which they fulfilled that role.

To achieve this, a type "Role" is proposed, alongside a new property, "hasRole".

Examples

hasRole/inRole in RDFa

Note that this example is an exploratory variation on the main proposal. It distinguishes between 'hasRole' and 'inRole'.

The original design circulated March 26th had a complication: it wanted a role-oriented property linking the Movie to the Role, and also the Person to the Role. To achieve this, local identifiers for the role were used (in JSON-LD syntax). Commentators on the list noted that this introduced new complexities for publishers. However it is hard to represent a complex graph structured without ID-based references. This example shows that it can be done in RDFa 1.1 notation, although this is also complex in a different way: